Rudy Giuliani hits the right note

There's a scene in Gone With the Wind in which Rhett Butler, having spent months courting the good opinion of Atlanta's most respected dowagers so that his baby daughter will not grow up as a social outcast, finally wins them over.

"There must be a lot of good in a man who cares so much about a child," one of the stout pillars of society declares. And that ends the argument. If she says Rhett Butler is all right, Rhett Butler is all right.

Something similar happened at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Friday.

Conservative columnist George Will gave Rudy Giuliani an introduction so glowing that the former mayor's former wives must have been throwing things at the television set.

On taxes, on crime, on welfare, George Will celebrated Rudy Giuliani's record as mayor as the finest conservative governance the country has known since Calvin Coolidge.

You may not remember this, but the folks at CPAC do: Calvin Coolidge was Ronald Reagan's favorite president.

George Will told the audience that Rudy Giuliani is a Margaret Thatcher conservative.

That won Mr. Giuliani a tremendous ovation from the conservative crowd, and it may very well be that Mr. Will has just ended the argument.

The argument, if you don't follow these things closely, was that conservatives would never, never support Rudy Giuliani for president because he supports abortion rights and gay rights, because he's been divorced twice, and because he generally can't be counted on to promote the social agenda of religious conservatives.

But it appears there are at least three reasons that this is not the case.

First, as George Will explained at length, Rudy Giuliani is no liberal.

Second, conservatives who want to win know that Rudy Giuliani is more likely to capture swing voters than a fiercely anti-abortion candidate would be.

Third, and this might be wishful thinking, it may be that some voters who thought it would be good to have a religious conservative in the White House have discovered there is a downside to having a president who talks to Jesus when he should be listening to Colin Powell.

Rudy Giuliani has demonstrated an ability to hit just the right note when discussing the appropriate response to terrorist attacks. After September 11th, when a Saudi prince offered New York City a ten million dollar donation accompanied by a letter suggesting that the attacks were an understandable response to America's foreign policy, Giuliani rejected the gift without hesitation. He told the prince there could never be any justification for terrorism and that it was a repulsive gesture to donate to the victims while blaming them for the attack.

In his speech to CPAC, Giuliani once again hit the right note. Without criticizing the policy in Iraq, he let it be known that he might have done things differently. "Maybe we made a mistake in calling this the War on Terror," he said. "This is not our war on them. This is their war on us."

The former mayor talked about the failures of earlier attempts to treat terrorist attacks as criminal acts, yet he was careful to say that he didn't blame anyone for making those decisions. It was the right note again: no one can say today, with U.S. troops stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq, that the policy of treating terrorism as an act of war has been any more successful.

All in all, Rudy Giuliani seems to be a man with a firm grip on reality. Unless that costs him California, he could be the next president of the United States.


Copyright 2007

Editor's note: You might be interested to read "Why the Iraq policy isn't working" and "The Motive for War: How to end the violence in Iraq."

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